Clarisse Thorn

I write and speak about subcultures, sexuality, and new media.

This is a slightly longer version of an article that was originally published at Role/Reboot. It also appears in my new collection, The S&M Feminist: Best Of Clarisse Thorn, which you can buy for Amazon Kindle here or other ebook formats here or in paperback here.

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Previously on Role/Reboot, we ran an interview with my friend Olivia, a 25-year-old graduate student who had just started having sex for money through a “sugar baby” website called SeekingArrangement.com. In the interview, Olivia covered a lot of topics. She mentioned that she usually feels powerful in her relationships with her clients. As she put it, “When I show up, I don’t feel like — here is this rich, powerful person who is about to bestow wealth upon me. I feel like — here is this person who is a bit sad and lonely, and maybe I can make their day better.” Olivia also noted that her negotiations can be delicate, because some men are quite squeamish while discussing money. And she explained that she’s married — but it was already an open relationship, and she doesn’t see having sex for money as different from the other kinds of sex that she and her husband were already having with other people. To deal with it, they’re sure to communicate clearly. As Olivia said, “We just have to talk about it.”

In the months since that interview, Olivia and I have hung out occasionally to talk about her experience with sex work. She’s traveled across the city to meet me, and often bought me coffee; non-judgmental social support for sex workers can be rare, and I’ve seen more of her since she started the job. Although she really enjoyed the work at first, there were tough times too, especially after the novelty wore off. Recently, Olivia decided to stop seeing clients. We talked it through and she gave me permission to write about it. (She also reviewed this article pre-publication.)

Obviously, there were logistical complexities from the beginning. Taxes were a nightmare. Olivia wanted to pay them, but it’s not the easiest proposition. Then there was the question of paying off her debts. Some were simple enough, but then there were loans co-signed by her parents, and there was no way she could make any headway on those loans without talking to her parents… so Olivia had to maintain the fiction that she couldn’t pay.

That was nothing compared to the complexities of feelings and communication, though. I’ve already shown you how hard it was, sometimes, for Olivia to talk about money with her clients. There are other, subtler problems that are hard to handle with empathy: for example, creating the Girlfriend Experience persona.

I’ve talked to sex workers who enjoy creating a “sexy dreamgirl shell” on behalf of their clients. One of them said to me: “I create that persona for my boyfriends anyway. It’s nice to be paid for it.” But as a feminist sex writer who’s spent years working to understand my own sexual authenticity, this freaks me out a bit. I think it would feel terribly toxic and inauthentic for me.

It often felt inauthentic to Olivia, for sure, and that got harder and harder. “These men are very invested in believing that I’m super into this,” she told me once. “I have to keep up the front, and make them feel like I’m interested all the time. It’s literally my job to do that. When they tell me how happy I am, or when they inform me that I’m enjoying myself, I can’t really contradict them, even if it’s not true. Some of them use words like ‘magical’ to describe me, but the person they’re describing is not really me. Sometimes I think these guys pay me because in a non-professional relationship, a woman might push back when he says those things. She might contradict his idea of her too much.”

In fairness, Olivia naturally fits one glam stereotype of the middle-class sex worker: the sexually adventurous young student. It’s such a widely-promoted stereotype that experienced sex worker activists speak derisively about it, and some escorts lie and say that they fit the profile when they don’t. Presumably, clients enjoy believing that a girl is a sexually adventurous college student because it capitalizes on images of “sexy coeds” — and convinces the client that she’s not being emotionally harmed by the work. (I’ve often thought that it’s way past time for “fair trade prostitution,” where sex trade ethics are made into a competitive advantage. I’ve also thought that the most feminist thing I could ever do would be to open a brothel where all the sex workers are treated well. Too bad it’s illegal.)

Of course, SeekingArrangement.com actively encourages the idea that a “real relationship” can emerge from these arrangements. (In our previous interview, Olivia pointed out the SeekingArrangement blog post “Sugar Baby & Sugar Daddy: The Modern Day Princess & Prince?” Another interesting one is called “Sugar Babies Do Fall In Love.”) While some guys on the site really do just want to pay for straight-up sex, some become emotionally invested in the women whose company they buy. And we can tell from Olivia’s experiences negotiating payment that a lot of guys don’t like thinking about how they’re paying for it.

Bottom line: more than one of Olivia’s clients were into her for real, and she felt more and more uncomfortable about it as time passed. One man took a surreptitious photo of her and hung it on the center of his otherwise-bare refrigerator. Another client made faux-offhand wistful comments such as, “If you weren’t already married, haha….”

Olivia asked my advice on one of these guys, who was clearly falling in love with her from the start. She mentioned that she’d already talked to another sex worker about it. The other worker’s reaction was, essentially, “What problem?” As Olivia put it: “She told me that the guy is basically a locked-in regular now, so what am I so bothered about?” But after a while, Olivia couldn’t take how guilty and anxious she felt around this guy, what with the feelings she couldn’t return. She stopped responding to his messages, but didn’t tell him clearly that it was over because trying to phrase the email felt so awful.

“I was so unprofessional about it,” she said. “In the end, he sent me this incredibly sweet note asking what he’d done to hurt me so badly. So my husband helped me write a ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ breakup email. I still feel bad.”

Another facet of emotional difficulty arose when Olivia’s husband started taking a medication that decreased his libido. This put the couple in the odd position of Olivia having sex with other men, but not her husband — with her husband’s full knowledge and consent. Although her husband tried to reassure her, she began feeling less secure and stable at home. And sex work is stressful enough that home security can really, really matter. Indeed, at one point Olivia mentioned: “One of my friends is tempted to get into sex work. But she says she doesn’t think she can deal with it, emotionally, unless she has a partner at home who loves her and will back her up. So I’m not supposed to let her have sex for money until she’s in a good solid relationship.”

Finally, as Olivia fielded other life stresses, she flatly realized that she couldn’t have anything extra going on. What with all the above conversations, we saw signs that the change was coming, but when it arrived it was both sudden and intense. “One day I just knew I had to stop,” she told me. “It’s bad, because we’re behind on rent now, but I had to stop. My husband pointed out, gently, that we need the money. But of course he accepted it when I said I was done. Anyway, I managed to line up a good temp job, so we’re okay for now.”

I tried to show in the original interview that Olivia is very privileged compared to most sex workers. She’s got race privilege for her whiteness, class privilege from her background; she’s pretty and young and “valuable,” and has tons of education to boot. She doesn’t have a drug habit or some other truly debilitating issue. Although she’s under some financial stress, she’s not desperate.

And that leads me to this question:

If even a woman like Olivia — who was well-treated and made a lot of money and didn’t feel trapped; whose life sounded like the glam fantasy of today’s high-end call girl — if even a woman like Olivia eventually needed a break from sex for money, then what could this imply about the experience of less privileged women? I’ve got a bunch of sex worker friends, and I would never say that a woman can’t be a 100% consenting adult sex worker who enjoys her job. But what I’m trying to get at, here, is that even on the “high end,” sex work can be incredibly demanding. Even when sex work is as pleasant as it possibly can be, it’s often very hard.

I’d like to see more conversations that acknowledge the reality of sex work as emotionally intense and challenging, a job that can be bad for many people at many times in their lives — without letting go of the fact that some people can and do freely consent to the job. (The sex worker Mistress Matisse has written more on sex work and emotional labor here and here. And male sex workers don’t always have an easy time; the porn star Tyler Knight has written about some of his more difficult moments, too.)

The point is not “sex work is bad and should be banned” — but nor is it “sex work is glamorous and fun!” The point is, sex work is often hard work, even for people who are not mistreated or abused. As such, it deserves both respect (from outsiders) and open-eyed caution (from those who consider taking it up).

Olivia’s not sure she’s done with sex work for good. “The door is still open for future involvement,” she told me, last time we met for coffee. “If I do go back, I think I may try for straight-up escorting, but I’m not really sure….” Presumably, working as an escort rather than being a “sugar baby” might evade some of these confusing, strangely-negotiated situations. Would it evade all of them? It’s hard to say.

Regardless, I wish her luck.

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The image at the top of this post is a panel from “Ramadan,” my favorite episode in Neil Gaiman’s legendary Sandman series of graphic novels. “Ramadan” was illustrated by P. Craig Russell and published in Fables and Reflections, the sixth Sandman collection.

17 Responses to “A Sugar Baby Leaves The Business”

Sex (or dancing, or pleasure) with clients is mutual for me. It’s not something I give and they take, it’s something we do and enjoy together. But sex work relationships … are not really mutual for me in the same way. The more emotional intimacy I have to fake, the less space there is for the authentic me to exist.

My other big problem is social isolation, both real (how other people treat me) and perceived (how I limit my life for fear of how other people MIGHT treat me). Your job can be the best and most lucrative thing in the world but if you don’t have family, what does all that money and accomplishment really buy you?

This is just a personal opinion but I think one of the biggest problem with sex workers is what’s actually expected of the job.

While it can be argued sex can be bought, emotional connection can’t and while sex, ecstasy and intercourse can be fake and still be perfectly pleasant for the client, an emotional attachment (the requirement for love or any kind of feelings attached) does not work if it is fake. I think that’s something we all understand at a very root level and thus when you fake it (be it as part of your job or as part of any kind of relationship) your ethical conscience kicks in and makes you uncomfortable.

Sex is undeniably attached to emotions for the vast majority of people and even when a sex worker might be able to completely separate both I would expect most of his or her usual clients, specially if they fit the description of “here is this person who is a bit sad and lonely, and maybe I can make their day better”, to NOT be able to completely separate them.

Quite honestly I don’t think sex work should be “emotionally intense and challenging”. How could it? As emotions do not fulfill (on the long run at least) when they are not genuine, there’s a clear conflict between what you’re selling (sex) and what the client is expecting (emotions, call it love or a desire for connection). Eventually the client will hire you for the second reason, even if deep down he knows it’s fake and will be even worse (because is fake) in the long run.

Yeah, social support really is the biggest thing that I think a lot of sex workers are missing, even 100% consenting ones. I think people underestimate what a difference it makes to your mental health to be able to talk about your job, especially the complications of your job, even with your parents. The community is where you’d get things like the burnout link from Annie Sprinkle (thanks Charlie). And pushing back against mainstream negative stereotypes just makes everything harder, as alex notes.

“I wonder if maybe some people might in some cases be reluctant to speak of the difficulty (and sometimes harm) of sex-work because it can be ammunition for those who would ban it entirely.”

Good point.

Most people can tell the difference between the hard work of, for example, voluntarily starting a cacao farm or voluntarily subsistence farming on one hand and the hardships of being enslaved on a cacao farm on the other hand, instead of wanting to ban both or allow both.

More people *should* tell the difference between the hard work of an adult’s voluntary prostitution on one hand and the repeated rapes endured by a kid enslaved in a brothel on the other hand, instead of trying to ban the work in the former scenario or demanding that the rapists in the latter scenario go free (see http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=8700407 ).

I think you’re assuming that all sex work involves the level of emotional work/unclarity that sugar dating involves. It really doesn’t.

In a nutshell, the more ‘respected/high-end’ sex work is, the more emotional work you have to engage in. (Trust me – street work and some forms of strip-club work are not extremely emotionally demanding). On the positive side, you’re treated with more respect and you earn more money. On the negative side, it’s tiring.

I also think that you’re leaving out the fact that ‘sugar daddy dating’ is really based around the premise of poorly-defined boundaries. That’s what facilitates the ultimate ‘I’m not paying you for sex. I’m taking care of you’ thing guys get off on. It’s the way money is discussed at the beginning and throughout the relationship. It’s the utter lack of norms and relational definitions for transactions/interactions between ‘sugar daddies’ and ‘sugar-babies’.

So I’m really not sure whether you can take ‘the emotional toll’ of an individual engaging in ‘sugar-daddy-dating’ as representative or even parallel to ‘the emotional toll’ characteristic of all sex work or even high-end sex work.

It’s different. And I think a lot of the emotional toll in sugar-daddy-sugar-baby relationships (for both parties) occurs because the relationship is poorly defined from the onset … whereas in ‘straight-sex-work,’ the relationship is clearly defined as a transaction and limited to paid interactions.

Which … is why most pro-doms (I’ve talked to at least) … will never take on a ‘personal slave’. Having a ‘personal slave’ = having a relationship where your obligations to the client transcend clearly defined boundaries.

1) I 100% agree with your comments: “Yeah, social support really is the biggest thing that I think a lot of sex workers are missing, even 100% consenting ones. I think people underestimate what a difference it makes to your mental health to be able to talk about your job, especially the complications of your job, even with your parents.” and “It shouldn’t be glamorized. It shouldn’t be criminalized”

3) I’d also really encourage you to not isolate critiques of “SEX WORK” as a category from other types of work that also involve emotional labor. For example, you can pretty easily find countless studies on “emotional labor” and “burn-out” for school teachers, nurses, social workers, cops, soldiers, flight attendants, waitresses, bar-tenders…

Basically, I guess I just don’t really think the story of one individual who dabbled in Sugar-Dating is a good ‘case-study-to-generalize-about-the-emotional-toll-of-sex-work-across-the-board.’

It’s complicated, it varies a lot between industries, and people handle it in a lot of different ways and draw boundaries in a lot of different ways. And some types of sex work have industry norms & standards & structures that facilitate peer-education, healthy boundary setting, authenticity, etc. better than others.

M, I don’t mean to overgeneralize, but the truth is that I’ve talked to plenty of sex workers who do discuss the emotional toll of their work, even the ones who aren’t in sugar dating. In this piece I also linked to multiple sex workers who have openly written about it, and there’s another comment on this thread from Charlie about how Annie Sprinkle — one of the more famous sex worker activists — has written about burnout.

In my original post, I didn’t say that sex work “always does” involve a significant emotional toll, but it’s obvious that it can. I’ve made all the arguments you’re making in your comments in other discussions and in other articles I’ve written; but while it’s complicated and all, I still don’t think the larger conversation about sex work deals with this topic very well.

No – I’m not saying that sex work is not emotionally demanding or draining for some or even a lot of people.

The thing is, for most people I know, the stigma and then the hustle (making sure you earn enough in a strip club to pay overhead fees; advertising, screening, having cancellations) are bigger emotional drains than the main drains for Olivia: lack of clear boundaries, having guys fall in love with her, and worrying about being authentic or inauthentic …

I worked as an au pair. I worked as a nanny. I did sugar dating. I worked as an escort. I think the difference between a nanny & au pair & escort/professional sex worker and a sugar baby are pretty similar.

And I don’t think talking about Au Pair issues I had (the boundary issues, lack of a clear job description or salary, emotional toll of being a family-member/servant as an Au Pair for a wealthy family) and why I quit would be a good jumping off point for saying that ‘even high-end child-care providers, who aren’t abused or coerced, who are well-treated and earn decent money, experience a significant emotional toll’ and then talking about the emotional toll of professional child-care work based on my experience as an au pair. It might be a good place to jump into a discussion of the ‘emotional toll’ of Au Pair work, though .

They’re both emotionally demanding. But a lot of what makes being an Au Pair draining doesn’t apply to professional childcare. That’s all.

I do think that the ‘emotional toll’ of straight sex work is well-documented and talked about in pretty much anything that is written about sex work… A lot of it tends to follow essentialist lines (mainly, that in-authenticity, sex, and manipulation are the root of the issue).

Temporarily Yours (Elizabeth Bernstein – mainly about U.S.-based escort work), State of Sin (About Nevada Brothels), Sex Work: A Risky Business (Teela Sanders – About British Brothels) and The Production of Identity and the Negotiation of Intimacy (Katherine Frank – About U.S. strip clubs) all do a really great job of talking about emotional work, boundary maintenance, and how sex workers deal with the emotional and psychological strain of intimate work.

They also do a really great job of addressing a major concern you have around authenticity — i.e. how do sex workers manage to maintain boundaries/not have guys fall crazy-stalker-in-love/live their own lives WITHOUT being inauthentic.

Bernstein calls it ‘Bounded Authenticity.’ Frank talks about how relationships between strippers & regular clients enter a middle-ground of ‘realness,’ one that’s based on two fantasy-identities.

State of Sin essentially writes about how workers conceptualize their work: some see it as ‘body work’ – so shallow acting – the GFE fantasy you wrote about. Others see it as ‘therapeutic work.’

A lot of women/clients conceptualize sex as a service, but the emotional content of relationships as ‘gift exchange.’ I.E. – They sell sex, but they also have intimate authentic friendships with clients.

And most major sex worker organizations deal directly with the emotional toll by facilitating peer support & organizing trainings around boundary-setting, maintaining a sustainable schedule, dealing with bad-clients, & helping people transition out of the industry or take a break from it or transition into a different work-environment or a different sector/niche of sex work.

I think sex worker organizations would include discussion of the ‘emotional demands’ of sex work in public discourse more, but honestly, pretty much any bad aspect of sex work winds up being used by prohibitionists as a reason to abolish the sex trade in-toto. So that discussion is mainly confined to more private discussions among workers/activists.

I think we’re essentially in agreement here. Yes, there are good and valid reasons why sex worker activists are reluctant to engage with the topic in a more mainstream way. I don’t think that changes the fact that it should be engaged with, though. The public has absorbed some basic sex-positive ideas by now, and I really think it’s time to take a lot of those to the next level — I feel the same way about S&M and conversations about mistakes and unexpected problems during S&M encounters, for example, which are all too rare because S&Mers are so scared of “bad publicity.”

About Clarisse

On the other hand, my latest book is about the history, stereotypes, and culture of BDSM:

I give great lectures on my favorite topics. I've spoken at a huge variety of places — academic institutions like the University of Chicago; new media conventions like South By Southwest; museums like the Museum of Sex; and lots of others.

I established myself by creating this blog. I don't update the blog much anymore, but you can still read my archives. My best writing is available in my books, anyway.

I've lived in Swaziland, Greece, Chicago, and a lot of other places. I've worked in game design, public health, and bookstores. Now I live in San Francisco, and I make my living with content strategy and user research.